Birmingham-based funk band St. Paul and the Broken Bones is back on the scene with their sophomore album, Sea of Noise. Released two years after their debut album, Half the City, the group is back with an album that combines classic soul sound with lyrics that are acutely aware of modern personal and political issues. It’s social protest music for today, wrapped in timeless funk tropes.
The group emerged during the retro soul revival of the last decade; think acts like Alabama Shakes, Lee Fields and the Expressions, and DapTone Record darlings Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings and Charles Bradley and the Menahan Street Band. On Half the City, frontman Paul Janeway’s vocals command your attention, as he sings, soars and screams over the wild musical backing from the rest of the sextet. Most of the songs on the album follow the same structure: Janeway holds back for the first few verses while the tension of the songs builds before letting loose for the last third of the songs as they build into anthems.
Half the City is catchy and infectiously cool, but the lyrics never stray too far from the subject matter that soul music has covered over and over again: heartbreak, pain and pride. Sea of Noise expands on those themes, and the album, as a result, reflects the band’s growth.
The opening track of the album, “Crumbling Light Posts, Pt. 1,” sounds radically different. Janeway’s vocals emerge soft and controlled, before being backed by a choir and a string quartet. The track—a nod to a quote by Winston Churchill, in which he compared England to a crumbling lighthouse in a sea of darkness—is a minute long ethereal self-exploration, but the dreamy sounds are quickly interrupted by the Sly and the Family Stone-ish swagger of the second track, “Flow With It (You’ve Got Me Feeling Like)..” The shift between the two tracks is jarring, but the band pulls it off, and instead flexes the new musical diversity the album showcases.
Since the release of their first album, St. Paul and the Broken Bones has grown from a sextet to an octet, and yet, despite the new members, the backing behind Janeway’s vocals actually sounds more controlled. Janeway admitted to oversinging on most of the tracks for the first album, and cautioned the band to avoid the same mistake. In result, the guitar, horns, drums and keyboard behind Sea of Noise are more in control of their own sound and can better explore soul’s diverse sound. Depending on the track, you can hear the influences of Prince, Al Green or Sam Cooke.
The album examines the personal in a few songs about relationships, but its attempts to look more broadly at political and racial issues surrounding Southern life are often surface level. Many listeners would be surprised to learn that Janeway is a glasses-wearing, 30-year-old white guy, as are all seven of the band’s other members. Soul and funk are genres created by black artists, and the band, obviously aware of this, shy away from addressing specifically racial issues aside from one lyric in “Brain Matter,” which references “a bullet with intent for the color of his savior.” The band has matured, but is still settling into their place inside the genre.